Fraction and Fusion: A Departure from Postcolonial Hybrid Identity in the

Select Poems of Derek Walcott

Dr. L. Judith Sophia

Assistant Professor of English

Scott Christian College (Autonomous)

Nagercoil - 3
judithsophia_71@yahoo.co.in

Postcolonialism, an outcome of sociological and philosophical ruptures within the

episteme occurring in the second half of the twentieth century, is a much debated,
discussed and deconstructed term even in the present scenario and postcolonial discourse
is a form of writing by the Third World natives and migrants who attempt to theorize their
past. The radical displacement of people through slavery, indenture and settlement is one
of the consequences of imperial dominance. The African diasporas in the Caribbean
islands are the cultural minorities who are subjected to a tragic alienation from their
language (culture) and their home place. Derek Walcott, a Nobel Laureate of the West
Indies, in his poetic renderings articulates a complexity of emotions and paradoxically
celebrates his divided heritage or hybrid identity constituted by three loyalties- the West
Indian, the English language and his African origin. His poems show how a rebirth is
possible through such fusion of loyalties. This paper attempts to analyze select poems of
Walcott from the collection, Collected Poems 1948-1984 (1992) to unearth the
recognition of multiple fragmented West Indian identities and his reconciliation with an
integrated universal human identity. His universal vision helps him identify his root with
the origin of human race that transcends racial, cultural, regional and linguistic
discriminations.

Being a cultural minority, African Diasporas in the Caribbean islands (The West
Indies) strive to establish their sense of identity, their sense of home, and their sense of
subject position against the backdrop of colonial hegemony. Walcott, a well-known
Caribbean writer oscillates between two cultures- European and African, is often
described as a “mongrel” (qtd. in Walder 122) for both of his grandmothers were African
and grandfathers were European. He is an offspring of both the Anglo-European and
Afro-Caribbean heritage. He loves both the African culture and the English tongue but
finds it difficult to choose between the two and prefers the liminal space. In Weintaub’s
words “Walcott acknowledges it is crucial to understand one’s heritage, one’s greatness of
origin even if it is thrust upon one but it behooves one to press onward” (28). In his search
for origin Walcott strives to integrate the divided self which is often engendered by the
totality of his legacy.

Through his poems Walcott discloses the fragmented or fractured identity that is
the offspring of fusion of cultures. He exploits and celebrates Antillean culture with its
fusion of English, French and Creole strands. Cameron King and Louis James express,
“Walcott … is caught between a commitment to English cultural traditions – ‘the English
tongue I love’ and the new national identity of the Caribbean” (287). Walcott’s life
swings between two lives and two languages and consequently he faces identity crisis.

Walcott emerges as a transcultural being who is subjected to cross cultural

exchange that paves way for hybrid or divided or fluid identity. “Hybridity” is frequently
used and disputed term in postcolonial discourses. In postcolonial studies it refers to the
absorption of European cultures by the inhabitants of the once colonized countries and
also points to the process of the sexual union of different races. To the editors of The
Empire Writes Back, “Hybridity commonly refers to the creation of new transcultural
forms within the contact zone produced by colonization” (118). In Homi K. Bhabha’s
words, “the concept of hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity
through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary
deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination” (112). The
phenomenon, hybridity is thus an effect of colonization and diaspora.

To grasp the ambivalence of hybridity, Bhabha suggests:

It must be distinguished from an inversion that would suggest that the

originary is, really, only an ‘effect.’ Hybridity has no such perspective
of depth or truth to provide: it is not a third term that resolves the
tension between the two cultures, the two scenes of the book, in a
dialectical play of ‘recognition’ … it is always the split screen of the
self and its doubling, the hybrid. (162)
For Bhabha, unlike Said, hybridity is little different. It refers to the discourse of the
colonial power being subverted by the language of the colonized. To Said, “Hybridty
refers to the overlapping, intertwining histories of the colonizer and the colonized in all
area, which is seen in the literary texts produced within this context” (115). As a result of
fusion of histories and cultures, postcolonial identity is in a state of flux. Harris, in The
Womb of Space, rightly points out, “Hybridity in the present is constantly struggling to
free itself from a past which stressed ancestry, and which valued the ‘pure’ over its
threatening opposite, the ‘composite.’ It replaces a temporal linearity with spatial
plurality” (34). The concept hybridity becomes a prominent one for diaspora people and
indeed many others too, as a way of thinking beyond exclusionary, fixed, binary notions
of identity based on ideas of rootedness and cultural, racial and national purity.

The sense of loss of identity is a reality faced by both the colonized and the
diaspora. It is an inevitable experience to the Caribbeans. Commenting on the identity
question in the postcolonial scenario, Hall remarks,

Identities are never unified and in late modern time, increasingly

fragmented and fractured, never singular but multiply contracted
across different, often intersecting the antagonistic discourses,
practices and position are subjected to a radical historicization and are
constantly in the process of change and transformation. (4)

In the Caribbean context, hybridity occurs as a result of immigration from imperial areas
of influence as slaves or indentured labourers. The Caribbeans have been left with no
possibility to assert their pre-colonial past for they emerge in the dislocated culture of the
West Indies. According to Antonio Benitez-Rojo, “Carabbean is a ‘repeating island’
characterized by a fractal diversity that is never far from entropy or chaos” (81). Being
aware of the fact that it is impossible to claim the pure original identity, Walcott prefers to
celebrate hybridity.

To Walcott the fragmentation of memory and identity is one of the common

attributes of a displaced writer. A writer who lives in abroad cherishes the memory of his
own country and tries to reflect that world. Walcott’s childhood memories are fragmented
and he realizes that it is impossible to give a precise history of the Caribbean. Therefore
he attempts to piece together his recollections to describe his vision of Caribbean and has
depicted the struggle faced by his people. Borrowing Rushdie’s words it can be said,
Walcott is “obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have irretrievably
lost” (10). Physical and mental displacements of the migrants result in fractured or
divided identity.

Walcott employs fragmentation and disintegration as metaphors for the loss of

identity. Sanga and Rusdie assert that the notion of fragmentation is relevant as the
expatriate or postcolonial migrant’s identity can be seen as “shreds and scraps of meaning,
arranged and rearranged by the experience of migration” (26). The postcolonial identity is
fragmented and multifarious because of its collusion with other cultures. The Caribbeans
are torn between the marginality of their Creole environment and their culture and
struggle to repossess the memory of a fragmented and ruined past. Walcott’s poetry stems
from a lamentation and his focus on the individual provides with the sense of a deep pain
that begins in a solitary soul and an outward environment.

Walcott’s much anthologized poem “A Far Cry from Africa,” remarkable for its
emotional complexity, proclaims his divided vein as, “I who am poisoned with the blood
of both, / Where shall I turn, divided to the vein” (26-27). He is placed in a liminal
position that he could not turn away from his African culture to be assimilated with the
English. He bears a multicultural and ambiguous identity and at this juncture he describes
himself as a man “poisoned with the blood of both” (26). Though trapped in his African
roots, he has unrestrained love for the English tongue which he has acquired from
learning. He closes the poem in an ambivalent note as he laments: “How can I turn from
Africa and live?” (33). Commenting on this ambiguous ending Thounaojam writes:

Although the poem ends in an ambiguous ambivalent fashion where

the persona representative of Walcott himself, fails to make a choice
between the English tongue he loves and the Africa he lives in, with a
state of hybridity. Such an ending anticipates at the same time, the
notion of a complete withdrawal and resistance from colonial
constructs of dualism that has made an artificial divide between
cultures as ‘high-low,’ ‘civilized-uncivilized;’ and so on therefore to
anticipate more positive construction of ‘Hybridity.’ (9)

Walcott’s appropriation of the colonizer’s language empowers him to talk back as he

pronounces the injustices done by the colonial officers and chooses to be neutral. His
unique voice in poetry has shaped his position at the crossroads between Caribbean and
British highlighting his hybrid identity.

Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight” reveals the journey of the poetic persona,
Shabine, a sailor who searches for an island that heals. He writes: “I was a dog on these
streets / if loving the islands must be my load / out of corruption my soul takes wings”
(27-29). Shabine feels that he has been corrupted and is ready to undergo a process of
purgation. The corruption in terms of European influence results in the hybrid identity:

But they had poisoned my soul

With their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,

Coolie, nigger, Syrian and French Creole,

So I leave it to for them and their carnival-

I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road. (30-34)

European culture with its material blessings and career advancements has poisoned his
soul. It is true that he has been engulfed by the white culture but he could not help his soul
undertaking a downward journey towards his African or Black root or past. The
Europeans have nicknamed the persona in the poem Shabine, “the patios / for any red
nigger” (37-38). He expresses his hybrid status consisting of the features of two races that
is in between Dutch and English. He proclaims:

I’m just a red nigger who love the sea

I had a sound colonial education,

I have Dutch, nigger and English in me,

And either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation. (38-42)

He admits that the sound European education and the English language have made him
popular and originally he is a multicultural Caribbean who celebrates the fragmented
identity. With pride he declares that he is “nobody” or a nation. He is neither a pure
African nor a European but nobody who represents the future Caribbean nation that holds
up its composite culture.
 Towards the end of the voyage Shabine is found “in a rapturous deep” (350). He
reveals his desperate state as:

There was no cleft rock where my soul could hide.

Like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light

Where I could rest, like the pelican know

So I got raptures once. (137-140)

These lines resound the Christian hymn of consolation: “Rock of ages cleft for me, / Let
me hide myself in Thee” (Sankey). Shabine too feels restless and seeks a place of solace
and experiences a moment of rapture when he “saw God” (140). Throughout his life he
has been in search of the place of rest. He finds it hard to identify his space or root. Due to
the hybrid identity he feels rootless as he says:

I had no nation but imagination

After the white man, the nigger’s didn’t want me

When the power swing to their side

The first chain my hands and apologise, ‘History;’

The next said I wasn’t black enough for their pride. (151-55)

His English upbringing and mixed blood have shown him as a white man to his people
though he does not accept the identity of the white man. The colonization has chained his
hands and apologized saying “history.” It is an inevitable moment for an African or
postcolonial subject who has been poisoned or polluted by the colonizer’s culture that
constructs him the “other” to the black people.

In order to overcome his desperate situation Shabine rediscovers his faith and is of
the firm view that God can save his people. He places his trust completely on God and
proclaims: “if life any! / I have not loved those that loved enough” (388-89). Shabine
reaffirms his faith in God who can lift sinking people:

I was ready for whatever death will.

But if that storm had strength, was in cap’n face,

 Beard beading with spray tears salting the eyes,

Crucify to his post, the nigger hold fast

To wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus

And the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us. (410-14)

He believes that the storm in their life will soon fade away and thereafter they can lead a
peaceful life as he states: “and the noon sea get calm as Thy kingdom come” (420).
Colonization has turned the colonized into a mute subject who is filled with fear and
anxiety. Hopeless Shabine suddenly regains the strength from within:

Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said;

‘I from backward people who still fear God.’

Let him in His might, heave Leviathan upward

By the winch of His will, the heart pouring lace

From his sea-bottomed bed. (401-05)

This inner voice of faith reverberates the words of prophet Isaiah: “In that day the Lord
with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpant, even
leviathan that crooked serpent and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:
1). This regained strength of faith helps him survive.

Walcott’s poem, “The Crusoe’s Journal,” through the phrase “perched between
ocean and green” (3), indicates the position of a hybrid postcolonial being. He feels lonely
because of his dual identity. The attempt of the Caribbeans to create a new culture by
wearing a mask to hide their originality is revealed in the following lines:

… the intellect demands its mask

That sun-cracked, bearded face

Provides us with the wish to dramatise

Ourselves at nature’s cost. (59-62)

Caribbeans appear different though they pose themselves as “naturalists” (64). They are
“castaways” and “beachcombers” who long to return to innocent Eden. They long for the
experience of the world of faith. Through this poem Walcott describes the shaping of a
culture with his noble address. This kind of poetic or cultural transformation has helped
him survive in the face of the complicated Caribbean experience of colonization.

In “Origins” the poet recalls how the process of civilization or colonization has
wiped out the original culture of the Blacks. He brings out the hybradized nature of the
Blacks at present as “But now, twin soul, spirit of river, spirit of sea” (98). This indicates
the fusion of the African river-centered culture and the European sea-centered culture.
The poem “Love in the Valley” expresses the in-between or liminal position, “and now I
drift elsewhere, / through hostile images / of white and black” (16-18). “Hostile image”
and “White and Black” highlight the hybrid or fragmented identity.

The poem “Goats and Monkeys” is a poetic rewriting of Shakespeare’s Othello.

Othello in the poem represents the African or Black. An African is compared to a “sliding
shadow”:

… Bent to her lips,

He is Africa, a vast sidling shadow

That halves your world with doubt. (5-7)

Othello’s African identity divides his world into two halves. He serves both the Venetian
society as a General, and rebels against the same society by crossing inter-racial
boundaries all for the desire of a white woman. The following lines display the hybridity
or divided vein: “Virgin and ape, maid and malevolent moor / their immortal coupling
still halves our world” (20-21).

Walcott’s deep compassion for the deprived and wretched West Indian is
effectively expressed in his poem “Laventville.” In his attempt to show compassion he not
only exhibits his interest in the Caribbean man and his destiny but also a sense of inner
destitution:

Something inside is laid wide like a wound,

Some open passage that has cleft the brain,

 Some deep, amnesiac blow, we left

Somewhere a life we never found,

Customs and gods that are not born again,

Some crib, some grill light.

Clanged shut on us on bondage, and withheld

Us from htat world below us and beyond.

And in its swaddling crements we’re still bound. (82-89)

The bondage he mentions is not merely the colonial enslavement. The “apish habits”
refer to the attempts of the blacks’ mimicry of the colonial masters that lead them to a
state of amnesia. Hopelessness and rage strike the poet’s mind for his people are
possessed by the spirits of the colonizers who dehumanize his people under the pretense
that they are civilizing them. Through his poems Walcott shows the split allegiance
between the home where he was born and his position in western culture. He realizes the
dichotomy between the two self images that are inevitable and without betraying his
native identity attempts to assimilate himself with the evolution of English Literature from
the Renaissance to the present and has absorbed the classical and Judeo-Christian past.

Walcott gets himself absorbed into the world around him with deeply disturbed
consciousness. In his essay “The Muse of History” he proclaims,

I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the
monumental growing and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves
of a fruit seemed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own
Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another and that was my
inheritance. (322)

Realizing the fractured identity he is not able to curse the colonizer because he possesses
and utilizes the resources of the English language. The local realities inspire Walcott’s
poetic idiom and facilitate his universal poetic tone. His mission is to search for the
solution, a redemptive panacea for the inequalities in the destinies of men.
 Walcott adopts the literary persona, the speaking voice of second Adam having a
creed of self adjustment, who moves towards a final triumph over the odds of his
circumstances. In the poem “Names,” he declares:

My race began as the sea began,

With no nouns, and with no horizon,

With pebbles under my tongue,

With a different fix on the stars. (1-4)

He identifies the origin of his race with that of the origin of human race. In this attempt of
tracing the origin of the black he transcends the angst of colonization. In the poem “Ruins
of a Great House” Walcott recognizes that the colonizer is “part of the continent, piece of
the main” (45). His accommodating spirit identifies that the English is not in pure vein as
they have been influenced by alien cultures. Even though the Europeans bring agony to
the blacks, the poet remains so magnanimous, instead of blaming them he acknowledges:
“Albion too was once / A colony like ours” (44-45). This realization compels the poet to
empathize with the colonizer and his rage is overcome by compassion. His struggle
between emotion and reason comes to an end as he states:

All in compassion ends

So differently from what heart arranged:

‘as well as if a manor of thy friends …’ (49-50)

Commenting on this Cameron King and Louis James opine, “the heart dictates anger, but
the intelligence controls, transforms” (288). With a noble heart filled with compassion he
accommodates the colonizer as fellow human being and friend and compassion triumphs
over anger and hatred.

The Caribbean realities inspire Walcott to have a vivid universal or Global human
vision that accommodates every one even though atrocious, as part of humanity. His
labour of love unites the broken pieces of hybrid or fragmented identities and leads one
back to the original status of oneness. His poetic persona celebrates hybridity instead of
complaining and faces the process of renaming and finding new metaphors and tries to
make his own tools like Crusoe. His global perspective of the fusion of identities and
races shows his vision for regeneration and positive celebration of life. This vision departs
from the postcolonial stand of usual resistance as it creates an international myth of a
racial paradise, where the colonizer and the colonized interact equally to establish a
unique, vibrant culture and have equal access to power, resources and privileges. Walcott
believes in this fusion of all races that transcends racial, cultural, regional and linguistic
demarcations.

Works Cited

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